Connecticut

July 31, 2006

Connecticut may have fewer natural wonders than, say, New Jersey, but what it lacks in physical beauty it more than makes up for in diners. The Nutmeg State has an abundance of them, wherein residents can feast on hearty fare like scrambled eggs, mac and cheese, and, lately, Joe Lieberman. As he fights for his political life against millionaire cable TV executive Ned Lamont, Lieberman has evidently decided to make his last stand in the humble greasy spoon.

May 01, 2006

Let the record show that Ned Lamont does not consider Joe Lieberman a whiny-ass titty baby. Nor does he believe that Connecticuts junior senator is a douchebag, an ass clown, or any of the other nasty names liberal bloggers have called Liebermanwhom, with those bloggers help, Lamont hopes to defeat in this Augusts Democratic primary. I really regret that rhetoric, Lamont said one recent afternoon, blushing a little as some of the derogatory appellations for Lieberman were read back to him. I think hes a good man, I think hes a patriot, I think he does what he thinks is right. ...

January 16, 2006

Ang Lee continues to astonish. In 1995, when his best-known film was Eat Drink Man Woman, set in his native Taiwan, the producers of Sense and Sensibility tapped him to direct their picture: an act of perception, of courage, for which all of us owe them thanks. Lee proceeded—incredibly—to make the best of the Jane Austen films.

January 16, 2006

Why are MoveOn, Daily Kos, and so many other liberal activists so keen to find a primary challenger against Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman? The more you peel the onion, the stranger the answer becomes.
The common explanation is that Lieberman is a conservative. Or, more specifically, he's a conservative who represents a liberal state--and, therefore, has no excuse. But, according to conventional indices, Lieberman is not a conservative.

May 30, 2005

The emerging narrative on John Bolton's now-likely confirmation as U.N. ambassador has produced an unexpected good guy: Ohio Senator George Voinovich. According to the accepted story line, a host of Republican Senate moderates sat shifty-eyed while Bolton's nomination rolled through the Senate; Voinovich at least had the presence of mind to bloody Bolton's nose along the way. The editors of The New York Times wrote approvingly of Voinovich's now-famous anti-Bolton soliloquy last week.

May 02, 2005

PATRIOT GAMES
Early this month, when Attorney General Alberto Gonzales took his case for renewing several provisions of the Patriot Act before the Senate Judiciary Committee, his interlocutors were not wholly convinced. Naturally, the newly confirmed A.G. turned on the charm. He even injected some rhetorical flourish in defending a few particularly controversial provisions of the Act, which the Justice Department admitted it had never actually had occasion to use. "It's comparable to a police officer who carries a gun for 15 years and never draws it.

March 22, 2004

ONE EVENING LAST OCTOBER, Mark Fisher, a nineteen-year-old student at Fairfield University in Connecticut, who had gone into Manhattan with friends, met a girl in a bar on First Avenue on the Upper East Side, got separated from his group, and was found dead the next morning on a Brooklyn sidewalk, his body wrapped in a yellow blanket, five gunshot wounds in his chest. According to a long article in The New York Times, Fisher's case remains unsolved mostly because no one who was with him that night seemed to want to tell the police everything that they knew.

March 10, 2004

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge by the Boy Scouts of America to Connecticut's removal of the organization from a state-employee workplace charity drive. The Court's decision attracted little public notice, earning just a single paragraph in The New York Times and five in The Washington Post. But the Court's refusal to hear the case was more significant than the lack of media attention might suggest. Back in 2000, the Boy Scouts won a major victory when the High Court, in Boy Scouts of America v.

August 19, 2002

Until one day several years ago, I, like most people, harbored no ill feelings toward the state of Delaware. I suppose in some vague sense I thought of it as harmless and even endearing, the way you tend to regard other small things, such as Girl Scouts or squirrels. But all that changed the summer day I moved to Washington, when, making my way down I-95 in a rental truck with all of my worldly belongings, I screeched to a halt in front of what turned out to be a two-hour backup in Delaware.